Comcast Jacks Customers Again - Modem Rental Fee Raised to $8 a MONTH!

[drmike]

Greedy ass Comcast, is at it again.   They are raising per month cable modem rental rate from an already offensive $7 a month to a new $8 a month rate.

If you are being gouged by Comcast, it is time to buy your own modem and kick Comcast to the curb.  List of approved modems:

http://mynewmodem.comcast.net/

 

[Jon.Fatino]

Sadly I have comcast at home and I did buy my own modem because I refuse to rent one for that price.

 

[Riccardo_G]

i have modem personal

 

[atho]

Man, Fuck Comcast. They have to be the worst company ever. I had a Docsis 3.0 modem subbed to the performance tier was getting the 25/5 decided to upgrade to Blast! and they could not get it working with my modem then they told me my modem was incompatible and not a Docsis 3.0. The modem clearly states that it is 3.0 on the side of it and in the manual and it worked at my old house. Finally i gave up and bought a new modem, boom, still won't work. They had to send a tech out to "rerun my entire house". After he rewired it all nothing still didn't work. Then they tried to charge me for the rewiring stated it was necessary. They finally hooked up a "rental" one and wow look at that it worked perfectly. The rental was the same model of the new modem i had purchased. They stated that it must have a different build and if I want my speed I would need to use there rental one. long story short, been complaining and still fighting it for almost 3 months now they have dropped the rental fee however each month my bill actually goes up with adding nothing to it. Up to over $200 now for TV and modem when the package was $69.99 for 6/mo then $129(?) after that.

Then they tried to charge me me since i was getting over the speed provisioned I'm getting close to 60/12 on a 50/10.

 

[shovenose]

Why am I the only person on this planet who has been nothing but satisfied with my Comcast internet?

That said, I'm running some fiber to my apartment complex for me and will also be selling internet off it. So the people in my complex can ditch AT&T and Comcast.

I'd say my only beef with Comcast is that they raise my bill a couple bucks a month for no reason whatsoever every time.

I do have my own DOCSIS 3.0 modem I got for $15 from work which does help.

But $8/month is ridiculous! I know for my internet company I'm going to be terminating with an Ethernet jack so they can use any router or PC and don't need a modem. On the other hand, I will rent cheap N routers for $5/month if people want them but still, $8/month is a joke.

 

[Jade]

Eventually it's gonna be expensive as hell ;P

 

[drmike]

Comcast should really merger with Time Warner...  Birds of a feather.

TWC has been jacking fees up on folks too.   The base rates for data services keep going up and since they did the monthly modem rental charge I think they are on the third price increase (in 18 months~)

For what folks in the States are paying these cable monopolies for data you could get real throughput and fiber in other civilized countries.

I for one would love to go back to the days of the independent local/regional cable operator.  I miss Qube cable, but probably none of you remember them.  The preceded Time Warner, but are a related company, circa 1983.

 

[Magiobiwan]

My household has used a purchased modem since we got Cable. All the way back in the early 2000's we got 768k/128k Cable Internet and bought our own Linksys Cable Gateway. DOCSIS 1.1 compliant. We kept that until about 3-4 years ago when we upgraded to speeds faster than DOCSIS 1.1 could support. Now we have a Motorola SBG6580 which works for our needs. 18Mbps/4Mbps Internet with 6 bonded downstream channels and 4 upstream makes for pretty good latency. 

 

[Cloudrck]

Does Comcast not allow you to buy your own modem?

 

[texteditor]

Why am I the only person on this planet who has been nothing but satisfied with my Comcast internet?

You aren't, there are many worse companies than Comcast out there (like TWC).

They are also really easy to work with if you pay for a business line vs. residential.

I've never had problems with Comcast

 

[TheLinuxBug]

Comcast is one of those companies where your experience varies greatly based on which "market" of theirs that you are in.  I have lived in Baltimore, MD, Pittsburgh, PA and my current location and I can tell you that services between each of the markets were drastically different.  In the smaller areas they tend to not to allocate enough bandwidth for them and it causes people who should be able to get higher speeds to see poor performance and high line noise.  Some of  their infrastructure is just purely outdated and really needs replaced but instead they try to make it work, once again providing poor performance and poor speeds.  If you are in a development that has been upgraded recently or built recently with their newer equipment you will find you get a lot better services.  So, what happens is people in the old areas complain until Comcast does something, well, Comcast doesn't want to foot the bill.  So their response is to hike the prices in that market to repay the money they spent to fix the infrastructure that they should have already fixed to begin with. 

The other side of this is just like the VPS business they oversell their bandwidth A LOT, so when they actually do end up in an position where they are so over committed  that they must upgrade, once again they pass the cost on to the customer instead of just upgrading things as they should.  It isn't the customers fault that they are over committed, but they don't see it that way.

For the most part, however, in my recent location that was built with-in the past 10-15 years the infrastructure has been built up correctly and I actually get the best performance now from Comcast than I ever did in the previous markets I was in.  Before in Maryland for example I was limited to 20/1 and now where i am with the same service I get 70/10. 

However, I do rent equipment and I firmly believe the amount you agree to pay going in for that should be the price it stays, its kinda bogus they can randomly change that on you.

Cheers!

 

[jarland]

I'll pay $8 for them to take this stupid router modem combo that won't let me shut off the wifi. Last thing I need in this city is more interference with my real router.

 

[Francisco]

Shaw has a rental fee of $5/m but does give the option to buy out the modem at any time. There is no setup fee when you sign on with them so the $50 they want for the modem is a good deal.

You can ebay the modem if you ever cancel with them so it isn't all that bad.

$8.00/month is harsh but welcome to cuntcast.

Francisco

 

[blergh]

This is just nuts, thank god I live in (The Soviet Socialist Republic Of) Sweden.

 

[nunim]

I used to pay $4/mo for AT&T's god awful U-Verse router, it wouldn't even let me tunnel IPv6.  Now in Canda-land I have Telus and I bought a modem/router outright and it does allow tunnels!

 

[drmike]

I'll pay $8 for them to take this stupid router modem combo that won't let me shut off the wifi. Last thing I need in this city is more interference with my real router.

That's quite funny and salt in my tired eyes today.   I have a new DOCSIS 3 modem I bought to kick the providers fees to the curb.  But, oh yeah, it's a mutant cable modem from hell.  Can't disable the wifi and I can't change the IP range on it..  No I am not joking.   I bricked another of the same modem by changing the IP range to 192.168.0.x instead of the 192.168.1.x I believe it ships as.

After doing that, reboot, nada... modem wouldn't even sync with cable company.  2 hours on phone with their tech people and they haven't a clue nor do I.   The modem has been paper clip reset and everything.   Attempts to reprovision it fail and the modem never sync.

So here's to not bricking this PoS replacement.   If I do I am ordering a complete different manufacturers modem.    

All this nonsense of buying stuff and it is still totally mutated and crippled.

 

[jarland]

I'll say this though. Comcast has been affordable, friendly, and accommodating for me in the context of where I came from. Cablelynx is literally the cable company from the most recent South Park episode. I couldn't even convince them to let me pay them money that I owed them, that they didn't tell me about or bill me for, because fucking me over with a credit report was way more appealing to them. Their suggestion? File a lawsuit. If I ever hear from them again...guess who can afford to do it just to spite them now

 

[drmike]

Yeah I swear these "utilities" run a racket with credit dings and paybacks somehow.

I spent literally 40 hours with a telco over a land line and being billed for services months after cancellation date.  Here they discharged that amount since it was fraud, but some genius gave the billable over to collection. Collection?  Hell, the telco sent me a check for $100~ in money they owed me in refunds.   If I owed them I wouldn't have received a check from them right?

Yeah no one in idiotville could ever even find the IOU.  But collection nazis call until this day.   Every once in a while I answer the phone and have some fun with them.  Then they sell it to another schmuck.

Like I care though.  Credit is so 2000 and prior.   

 

[KS_Phillip]

This is just nuts, thank god I live in (The Soviet Socialist Republic Of) Sweden.

Absolutely.  $13/month for 100Mbps symmetric fiber, thanks

 

[MannDude]

Fiber company here charges $10/mo for a $50 Linksys/Cisco router. It's dumb.

Best just to get yourself a decent home router, it'll pay for itself in a year or less.